| Portland Press Herald review | My Father the Werewolf
Book Review by Nancy Grape
Werewolf takes bite of life, spits out wry tale
Let's face it. Being a teenager can be rough. And having a dad who's a werewolf is bound to make it even rougher. Just ask 14-year-old Danny Paxton, the hero of "My Father the Werewolf," a wry and rueful novel for young adults by Henry Garfield of Belfast.
The book is delightful, for what it tells us about teenagers and for what it says about families, courage, the occult, the appeal of life in a small Maine town and the perils of personal and community changes.
For Danny, his sister Miranda, 16, and their father, Ken, the story begins with an accident. They are walking one night on a beach near a campground in Southern California when their father is attacked and bitten by a werewolf, who comes leaping out of the bushes. With the aid of an old man, Ken Paxton fights him off. But the bite, the family is told, condemns him to become a rampaging werewolf every full moon.
Change like that would disrupt any family, and the Paxtons are pretty disrupted already. The parents are divorced. The mother is an alcoholic, the father an aspiring screenwriter who has never quite found his way. The prospect of becoming a danger to his children and others around him, however, persuades Ken Paxton to find his way home, to Liverpool, a town not unlike Belfast, on the coast of Maine.
For the kids, having dad become a werewolf soon becomes one more reason to complain. "You know, just because he's a werewolf shouldn't mean that we have to suffer," Miranda tells her brother in a fine eruption of teenage angst.
That's part of the fun of this book. And a part of its insight as well. For teenagers, it suggests, parents are already so much of a mystery that adding a werewolf to the mix isn't such a big deal.
Their father, for instance, is a Red Sox fan. And he's morose to discover that an attractive woman he's met favors the New York Yankees. "Are you saying, that her being a Yankee fan is a relationship breaker, while your being a werewolf isn't?" Miranda asks her dad.
"Their father slumped back in his chair, deflated. 'Well, she doesn't know I'm a werewolf,' he said."
Kids don't find parents easy to decipher.
In time, however, Garfield's storyline takes a more serious tone. Ken Paxton has chosen to ride out his werewolf transformations on an isolated island, uninhabited and cut off from the mainland. That way, he's convinced, he can avoid harming others.
All goes well until a hard freeze strikes the harbor during a full moon and Danny must find a way to keep his father off-shore. How he does so gives readers conflicts to ponder that go beyond werewolves of fiction to real-life changes in Maine.
Ultimately, "My Father the Werewolf" is a novel about consequences, those we can foresee and those that leap out at us from the bushes. Garfield confronts both with fresh insight and wry humor.
Garfield, a journalist, writing teacher and great-great-grand- son of President James A. Garfield, is dealing with something more scary than werewolves. He's dealing with life.
Nancy Grape of Freeport is a freelance writer.
Copyright © 2006 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.
|
|
